CONCEPT
Cognitive Collage
Tversky's model of how the mind actually holds space and domain knowledge—not as a consistent survey map but as a partial, perspectival assembly of multiple viewpoints and encounters, systematically distorted in ways that sacrifice metric accuracy for functional usability.
The mind does not build tidy, metrically accurate models of the domains it reasons about. It builds
cognitive collages:
spatial representations that are partial, perspectival, assembled from multiple viewpoints and multiple encounters with the domain, distorted in ways that are systematic and functional rather than random and erroneous. A person's mental model of her neighborhood is a collage of routes walked, landmarks noted, and partial maps glimpsed — not a consistent survey map. Her memory of a familiar building is a collage of partial views from different approach angles, different times of day, different purposes of visit. Her understanding of a software system she has worked in for years is a collage of workflows imagined, user scenarios considered, and architectural fragments conceived across dozens of sessions. In each case, the collage is less accurate than a complete and consistent representation, and more useful than such a representation would be for the cognitive tasks at hand: the